I Want This To Happen So Bad Now And Love Your Tags

I want this to happen so bad now and love your tags

You fools. You absolute morons.

If you think Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Adrien Agreste are going to date post reveal, you’re wrong.

Clearly, they will date in their civilian identities when Adrien tries to move on from Ladybug, but Marinette will break it off because she discovers she loves Chat.

Then, ladybug will confess to a heartbroken chat noir and they will date as superheroes, which Chat will break off because he still loves Marinette.

THEN, Chat and Mari won’t date eachother because that whole superhero and civilian thing won’t work out. And then Mari and Adrien find that they also still love their old crushes.

Chaos ensues. It’s ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. And until they reach this point, the reveal won’t happen. As this is when they love both sides of eachother and this is where the writing will peak.

Mari and Adrien will be a mess in trying to decide. And the reveal will wrap it up in a nice little bow :)

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

And no I will not take constructive criticism.

the most bizarre and incomprehensible thing to me is how miraculous ladybug keeps hammering on and on that adrien and marinette are in the exact same position when it comes to their crushes, and the fandom completely glosses over the parallels and puts the blame on one side only. the only major difference is that adrien pursues ladybug as chat, but resorts to being a blushy and shy mess as adrien, and marinette, while more confident as ladybug, is still unable to confess on either side of the mask (there's also something to be said about how adrien said in "desperada" that ladybug can finally love him as himself, "as adrien", but that's meta for another day).

i don't know if it's because the show is so heavily from marinette's POV, but the salt directed towards adrien for continuing to flirt and be in love with ladybug post-"glaciator" is disproportionately huge when you keep in mind that marinette found out adrien loves someone else in "the puppeteer 2", and the next episode was "chat blanc", where she sneaks into his room to give him a romantic gift. both of them are in the same situation.

adrien is in denial about his feelings for marinette, the soft looks, how much he enjoys her company, how he singles her out in a room of people; ladybug is in denial about her obvious attraction to chat noir, the jealousy she feels when another girl flirts with him, the way she enjoys how he pushes her buttons, how in-sync their minds and bodies are.

adrien moved onto kagami because his crush was unavailable; marinette moved onto luka because her crush was unavailable. somehow i've seen takes how marinette having photos of adrien in her room in "truth" is "bad writing" and "out of character", but adrien is treated as a real human, a horrible one to boot, because he has ladybug as his phone screensaver. it's the same situation.

in "glaciator" he flaked on his friends to spend time with ladybug; marinette was only interested in adrien being there and immediately left after she figured out he wasn't coming. once again - same situation. adrien can be distracted and moody during akuma battles because ladybug doesn't return his feelings; marinette nearly gave her miraculous to volpina and compromised master fu's identity because of her jealousy of adrien. both of them prioritize the person they're in love with over everybody else.

it's fine if this type of obsessive and reckless love isn't something you're interested in watching. but only calling out one person when the other half of the equation is doing the exact same thing is not a good look.

Gabriel Agreste sucks for a bunch of reasons, but credit is due, he really loves his wife. Chat yelled at him once, and immediately Gabriel was like (fondly) "my wife used to do that"

he has to blush they have to parallel the glaciator 2 ladynoir kiss they wouldn't forget

A Primer On Medieval Islamic Food

Part 5: Recipes For Home Cooking

[Image ID: Illustrated table filled with medieval Islamic dishes. For a detailed description, go to the References section, Full Image Descriptions subsection for Image 1. Illustration by rhipiduridae. /end ID]

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So you want to try cooking these dishes yourself. Fortunately many of the recipes are fairly clear and/or the translators did a decent job. Some even have measurements, though you’ll need to scale down from making banquet-sized meals.

This food is rich, fragrant, and visually pleasing. I’ve made a number of dishes, which will be posted in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some tips, tricks, and caveats to help you get the context for cooking medieval Islamic food.

Part 4: Typical Meals << Masterpost Index

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Tips and Tricks

Many of these recipes have a modern variant - the trick is knowing what it’s called. In addition to complete name changes, Arabic text doesn’t always require vowels to be specified*, as many of them are indicated through optional diacritics, which makes the romanization highly variable. For example, jute mallow stew (ملوخية‎) can be written as mulūkhiyya, mulukhiyah, molokhia, melokheya, etc. When searching for modern versions, look for similar combinations of ingredients along with the region the recipe came from. Or learn Arabic, like I am.

While some of these recipes will call for special ingredients, most should be readily accessible (at least in the US and I assume most of the western world). Look for Middle Eastern, Iranian, or Indian markets. I’ve also listed substitutes if you can’t quite find what you need.

Due to the toughness of most meats at the time, recipes often call for meat to be blanched (briefly boiled) before cooking via other methods. This also removes some of the gaminess from mutton or goat. Given that today’s meats are aged and are much more tender, this is not a necessary step and will in fact make the meat tougher. If you want to be super authentic and blanch meat anyway, put the meat in cold water and let it come to a boil, then skim off the surface scum and cook as usual.

I highly recommend Medieval cuisine of the Islamic World: a concise history with 174 recipes by Lilia Zaouali for an edited compilation of historical recipes, as well as modern-day interpretations of those recipes with clear measurements and steps.

* Please check the notes for this post for @rosycoconuts’ excellent info about harakāt (vowel diacritics) and their use in writing.

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Historical Cooking Limitations and Caveats

The surviving cookbooks were all written or commissioned by wealthy folks. Some recipes are intended to reflect what commoners would eat, but most recipes focus on the exclusive, the exotic, and the extravagant. As such, meat features very heavily while vegetarian dishes are mostly included for their perceived health benefits, when your typical commoner was unlikely to have meat in their daily diet. Similarly, a number of ingredients like spices would have been out of reach for most people save for special occasions.

The quantities of ingredients like spices or oils are extravagant by today’s standards. Some recipes call for an amount of saffron that terrifies even this “I buy spices as a hobby” tumblr user**. For that matter, since most of these recipes were meant for the house chef, the few cookbooks that give measurements are aimed at feeding a LOT of people. I know people like cookies but the Ibn Sayyār recipe for ka’k calls for 7.5 pounds of flour. For reference, 3 cups is about a pound. That’s… a LOT of ka’k.

Even the most meticulous of writers would gloss over things they would assume were common knowledge. Recipes will often call for ‘vinegar’ without specifying which type. An educated guess would be wine vinegar, or date vinegar to avoid the alcohol, but we don’t know for sure. Even worse, occasionally the writer will just say, “this dish is so common I’m not going to bother telling you how to make it.”

And finally, even with the most accurate of ingredients and cooking vessels, inevitably dishes won’t taste EXACTLY how the originals did. Much is made about terroir in wine, and it’s only amplified when you’re trying to recreate a dish thousands of miles away with plants and animals that have also evolved for over a thousand years.

That said? This food is still amazingly tasty. And there’s something very poignant about knowing cooks from a thousand years ago were reading the same text and making the same recipe you’re making now.

** At last count, I had 85 different types of spices and herbs. I think there’s more now. Help.

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Medieval Islamic Recipes

I will be adding links to the home-tested recipes on the masterpost, but will also add them here for posterity or if you want to track updates from here. Thanks for reading!

Sikbāj: Sweet and sour lamb stew

Tharīd: Chicken stew with bread

Fatīr: Thin flatbread

Mujabbana: Cheese fritters

Byzantine himmas kassā: Sweet hummus

Tabāhaja: Lamb with spiced sauce

Atrāf al-Tīb: Spice mix

Būrāniyya: Fried eggplant and lamb

Maqlūba: Meatballs

Bādhinjān Mahshī: Eggplant appetizer

Murakkaba: Layered date cake

Part 4: Typical Meals << Masterpost Index

Okay the WEIRDEST THING is going going down right now

So some guy in Michigan in the US has just found a letter in his grandmother’s house; it seems to be a pen pal letter from 1973ish, and it’s from a young Welsh girl. In it, she lists:

Her name, and the names of her brother (Gwynedd) and sister (Catrin)

Their ages

Where she lives in Wales (Denbigh)

Her hobbies, including horse riding and reading pony books.

So this American dude decides to take a photo, whack it on Twitter and ask the only Welsh person he knows if there’s any way to track this Welsh girl down, because you know, ALL WELSH PEOPLE KNOW EACH OTHER, OBVIOUSLY

Except

I am furious to report that it has worked

Welsh person he tags doesn’t know, but takes up the challenge. Someone reckons the Catrin might be a woman who translated a hymn book once, and checks the foreword to see that the dates and ages do seem to be about right. Someone else suddenly has a brainwave - wait, isn’t she the mother of Steff, the comedian?

My husband gets tagged, takes one look at this letter, and is like “That is 1000% my aunt.”

So now it’s 20 to midnight, Steff’s aunt has obviously not yet seen the excited message to put Twitter out of their misery, and my mother-in-law is currently on the phone gleefully telling us that when that letter was written her sister had never sat on a horse in her life before, and she’d lied to an American pen pal for clout before the internet even existed.